iCUE Link fan lighting freezes / iCUE crash during gaming

[B Chap]

So I have been having issues with my QX iCUE Link fans freezing during gameplay sessions. Almost immediately after launching a game, my lighting effects freeze in place for all 11 of my fans. I also have an XD5 Elite water pump attached to the Link hub that freezes as well. The lighting on my Corsair RAM and XC7 CPU water block are unaffected. It's only the items linked to the hub. I don't have more than 7 devices per port. 7 fans on one side with 4 fans and the pump on the other. Closing the game does not restart the effects. Attempting to change the effect will also do nothing. The fans also fail to ramp their speed down after everything has sufficiently cooled. The only way to bring everything back to normal is to close iCUE and restart it. Not every time, but occasionally, iCUE will also fully crash during gameplay sessions. If I restart iCUE while the game is still running, everything will typically start to run fine. But, it may still occasionally freeze or crash after some time. This has been happening since I installed the Link system on both iCUE 4 and 5. All software and firmware is current and up to date. All plugins are off and armoury crate is not installed. I have tried repairing iCUE and doing a clean install. I do have a Logitech keyboard and mouse with G HUB installed but removing G HUB does not resolve the issue either. I have also turned off the integrated windows RGB control option. This only happens when running 3D applications, full screen or windowed. 3D benchmarks cause the issue as well. I've tried 3 different hubs and the errors happen on all of them, so I know it's not the hub itself. Has anyone else also had this issue? Is there a fix or workaround? 

[B Chap]

Okay, so I was able to figure this out. Unrelated to the issue, I was doing some research and decided to get rid of Norton 360, which I had installed. After uninstalling, I noticed that my lighting was no longer freezing. In hindsight, I believe this was being caused by the gaming function in Norton, which disables background processes to free up resources during gaming.

For anyone running into this same issue, try uninstalling Norton. If you don't wish to uninstall, disable the gaming function. If you don't have Norton, check your antivirus suite to see if it has a similar function. If you are running any 3rd party software that also performs a similar function, try disabling/uninstalling it.

I hope this helps.

[DevBiker]

Wow. That's good to know and watch  out for. One would think it'd also have a way to prevent it from disabling certain background processes but fully disabling that certainly works.

Add antiviruses to the list of things that can interfere with expected iCUE behavior ...

[c-attack]

Someone else recently posted with a similar issues and managed to trace it back to that same program. Not something I would have guessed and it had not come up before. This is good info and hopefully we can spread the word. 

[B Chap]

Just now, DevBiker said:

Wow. That's good to know and watch  out for. One would think it'd also have a way to prevent it from disabling certain background processes but fully disabling that certainly works.

Add antiviruses to the list of things that can interfere with expected iCUE behavior ...

I never did dig into the game function to see if it's possible to whitelist processes as I had already decided to remove the software before hand. That may be worth looking into though.